Disqus - Latest Comments for rogerben

Re: Why I switch services so often (why I don’t use Google Reader anymore)

rogerben — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:59:38 -0000

Exactly. If Robert considers that list of tweets an upgrade from GR, then I suspect he's been trying to use GR in some rather unusual ways. But then, he's Robert... violating the norms of software interaction is pretty much his career. :)

Sub-140 character limits, obfuscated URLs, being forced to load someone's full site every time I want to read something, random mixing of conversation with content, and so on mean that Twitter has no shot at replacing GR for me.

Re: Testing BuddyPress (Scripting News)

rogerben — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:48:05 -0000

Dave: BuddyPress isn't a Twitter clone; it's closer to MySpace than anything. If you want a WP-powered Twitalike, you need the P2 theme.

BP is everything: status updates, group forums, photo sharing, and so on.

Re: Digital iPhone cheapskates

rogerben — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 01:26:21 -0000

Robert: If it weren't for Apple's insistence on controlling the ins-and-outs of iPhone development, the Twitter client market wouldn't even exist. There would be a dozen open source apps out there doing the job quite nicely. We're not talking about something as complicated and asset-laden as game development here... Twitter apps are so ubiquitous because they're so easy to develop.

(SIDE NOTE: If you have to do a "complete rewrite" of an app that primarily queries an HTTP API and displays the results, then you really hosed things up in your 1.0 version. You should at least offer people a sheepish grin while charging for the update.)

Also, I don't see anyone expecting developers to work for free... people simply expect that once they pay for something that doesn't have a ton of intrinsic value to begin with, they're not gonna be asked to keep shelling out. After all, if I'm really gonna worry about the "developer ecosphere", then I'm better off giving my $3 to someone developing a 1.0 app in relative obscurity than throwing cash at a 2.0 product with a ton of hype behind it.

But now that I think about it, I'm not interested in encouraging *all* developers in the first place. "Mercenary" developers, for example; if the only thing that drives you to update and improve your app is an increase in sales, then I don't really care about you one way or the other. The people I want to throw money at are the folks who actually use their own stuff, and want to keep tweaking it so *they* can get more out of it. Developers like that aren't gonna abandon their products or hold out for an upgrade fee before innovating. As much as they need to pay the rent, they also want to make Cool Stuff, and they are among my heroes.

Re: Skeet On Mischa, Welcome to my nightmare. I miss TNT. I miss Craig...

rogerben — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:25:21 -0000

Hey, JVG is just fine... Jackson just won't let him talk 80% of the time. And there is no one (not even Reggie Miller) that I want to hear from less than Mark Jackson.

Re: Facebook needs lessons in community management. Now.

rogerben — Mon, 11 May 2009 05:11:11 -0000

Karoli: I want to preface this with the fact that I may have missed something coming out of Facebook that contradicts my understanding of the situation, and if so, I'm more than willing to revise that understanding. Having said that...

This isn't a Facebook thing. It's a cultural thing. As a society, we pride ourselves on defending the rights of people to express any dumbass thing they like... UNLESS what they're trying to publish is a photo of someone's genitals or secondary sex characteristics. Outside of the occasional Piss Christ, our notions of "obscenity" are almost exclusively focused on Things That Get People Off.

So FB is in a bind here. By allowing Holodenial groups, they can take a principled stand on freedom of expression. (And I applaud them for it.) They'll get pushback, but there's pretty broad, across-the-political-spectrum support for staying that course. Nips, on the other hand? Sheesh.

By disallowing nipples, Zuckerberg & Co. risk pissing off the relatively small number of moms who want to display their mammarian wares, while simultaneously pleasing the (let's face it) massive majority of moms who are convinced little Junior will be scarred for life if he so much as gets a peek. Let's ignore for the moment that the average Junior has already seen bukkake by the time he's old enough for Facebook... reality is not these folks' strong suit.

The bottom line is that FB would rather have a rep as a protector of free, idiotic speech than be declared a cesspool of sexual iniquity. I'd hate myself in the process, but I'm not sure I'd handle it any differently.

Re: Tricks your mind plays (Scripting News)

rogerben — Tue, 05 May 2009 06:40:58 -0000

"There's no way you can know if someone is angry or not, esp if you're just reading."

Sure you can. I mean, if you're an incompetent writer, or intentionally trying to obfuscate your emotional state, signals can get crossed... but if I couldn't tell how people feel by reading what they write, there wouldn't be any point in reading them at all. People aren't abstract fact buckets; they're living, thinking creatures who often telegraph their emotions even when they try to hide them.

"To respond to this person as if he is angry now would be a mistake."

Nope. To write angrily, when your anger is shallow and sure to pass quickly, would be a mistake. If you're gonna rant and shake your virtual fist at the heavens, then you'd better make damned sure that you'll be willing to defend your rage tomorrow, or at least admit you went over the top and have moderated your feelings upon reflection.

In short, it's not the reader's job to assume in advance that you no longer mean what you've said.

Re: Retweet is stupid (Scripting News)

rogerben — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 20:07:43 -0000

Dave: I think you're giving too much credit to "like", since it's kinda hosed. Like many folks, 1/3 of the time, I "like" something so my network will see it. But I also end up using it to keep track of things I want to return to later (as a bookmark, IOW), and occasionally as a personal pat-on-the-back to the author. In the latter instances, it would be better if the action *didn't* end up pushed out to friends and FOAFs.

You've also got to remember that your Twitter network doesn't look like everyone else's. My wife uses Twitter almost exclusively as a non-geek semi-synchronous chat room, and given Twitter's awful conversation support, RTs are the best way to push the discussion around. There's no real sense of voting... it's making sure that some funny bit of snark reaches beyond the author's own network.

And finally, a little nitpick. "Share" is Friendfeed's version of RT. "Like" is FF's version of favorites, IMO. It's Twitter's favorite functionality that's broken, not the concept of retweeting.

Re: What about Sy Hersh? (Scripting News)

rogerben — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:55:40 -0000

Dave: I dunno if I agree about academia being a good fit, but it *is* a very interesting idea. Thanks for the notion to chew upon.

Re: Bootstrapping thumbnails for photo apps (Scripting News)

rogerben — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 08:31:04 -0000

Good catch, Sam. Even putting aside the XHTML issues, marrying Dave's original idea of using the link element with @data-* attributes would be significantly more useful than creating a new element in a new namespace.

Re: Dare left something out (and it's important) (Scripting News)

rogerben — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:58:55 -0000

Well, you *could* use XML-RPC as a payload in a RESTful app... all you'd really need to do is treat the method/fail elements as vestigial organs and use HTTP verbs and URIs appropriately. But as others have pointed out, once you're doing that, why not just use JSON and get the bennies of broader client support?

Re: louisgray.com: As I Get Older, Some Online "Friending" Gets Creepier

rogerben — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:35:12 -0000

LG: First off, to whom do you need to "explain any interest"? Are there Friend Police running around out there, making sure that you only value the ideas and contributions of people who were born in the late '70s?

Second, people "should be concerned" if you're real world friends with a 20 year-old? Dude, what kind of Neo-Victorian crap have you been fed? I wouldn't normally be so blunt, but it's obviously causing you some discomfort... you're a caring, thoughtful guy who has been sucked into one of our culture's many sinkholes of self-doubt.

I wouldn't care if you were *dating* a twentysomething, let alone befriending one. I was once twenty, and more than half my friends were in their late 30s... hell, one of them was seventy! Now I'm 38, and those friends are in their fifties... big whoop! (The seventy year-old sadly passed ten years ago.)

Cut yourself a break, Louis.

Re: Grokking FriendFeed - RussellBeattie.com

rogerben — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:42:04 -0000

Russell: If FoaF posts are bugging you, you need to unsub from some friends. Remember that you only see FoaF posts when one of your friends "likes" or comments on something... so despite the service's name, you're not subscribing to friends as much as editors. I had to "fire" Scoble as an editor just to get the flow under control and skew it away from trendy tech news.

Re: Please Gabe don’t listen to Dave

rogerben — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:47:52 -0000

Don't know how that duplicated, although I got a server timeout after posting. Flood control, Disqus?

Re: Please Gabe don’t listen to Dave

rogerben — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:47:10 -0000

I don't want to be Dave's apologist, but I don't get what you don't get.

"I don’t feel a need to reinvent the web inside of FF."

Two people had just suggested FF as a substitute for Techmeme. Dave --well known for disliking data silos-- was indicating his belief that FF can never substitute for the open web which powers Techmeme.

"However it is part of what I do, in the same way Twitter is. I like FF better, but only marginally better. It’s very far from the ideal."

TRANSLATION: "Don't get me wrong... I like Friendfeed, and Twitter for that matter. I use both. But they aren't adequate for this use-case."

"None of these guys have managed to combine all the elements the way plain old HTML does it so well."

At this point, he's simply saying that HTML-based writing and hypertext in an open, distributed environment, is still the best way to disseminate information. FF and Twiiter bring a couple of nice touches that are missing from conventional, stand-alone sites, but those touches don't outweigh the downsides.

Re: Lets Talk Copyright

rogerben — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:58:36 -0000

PREFACE: I am not defending fav.or.it or splogging. Wrapping ads around foreign content is a bad thing. Allowing your aggregated pages to be indexed by search engines is a bad thing. The end.

Duncan: Now then... you're missing some important points that make your, um... emphatic arguments a bit over-the-top. First, is that copyright law does *not* (in the U.S.) allow for unfettered personal use. For example, in the Betamax case, it was established that time shifting of broadcast content was allowed, but not archiving. In other words, that thing that Google Reader does? A clear violation of copyright. Given that you just declared GReader okey-dokey, you might want to dial back the certainty and righteous indignation.

Also bear in mind that GReader (and every other responsible feed-related service) does a lot of content modification. They're not just displaying full content... they *modifying* that content by cleaning/stripping style attributes, scripts, and so on. In other words, creating derivative works. Something that, another technical copyright no-no.

It's also worth pointing out that your declaration that you can only get to GReader data by logging in is incorrect. GReader provides public feeds, which is how RSSmeme got the data they were working with. (Odd that no one threatened to sue the Big G, where the money actually lives.)

SUMMARY: The web is more complex than existing copyright law. I suffered my first site-scrape in '99, and I hated it as much then as your do now. We're really on the same page... I'm just not crazy about how you keep acting as if this is a simple matter, and anyone who disagrees with your conclusions is a splogger.

Second, IMO, the implied license for RSS is clear... you put it in the feed, it's cool to republish it. The core purpose of RSS *is* republishing, even if it has been adopted for other uses. Again, I'm not saying that the implied license frees you to wrap ads around republished content or engage in any other extracurricular activity. But that core notion needs to be preserved and understood.

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

rogerben — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:54:39 -0000

"Certainly we can all agree that Google or Internet Archive != fav.or.it"

Sure, in the sense that the former is actually a far more egregious abuse of the sort of formalist copyright policy you're advocating. Unlike HTML, RSS was specifically designed to enable content from one site to be displayed on another. By publishing a feed, you are explicitly opting into that ecosystem. When Google or the Archive create copies and derivatives of HTML content, they require an opt-out, even though they're using that HTML in ways not intended.

Again, this doesn't mean that I advocate a "screw y'all, I'm gonna do as I please" approach. I simply insist that responsibility must be taken on both sides. I launched a (wholly unsuccessful) fav.or.it-ish service years ago, and I followed a series of very simple rules in handling content:

(1) Used "noindex,follow" on all pages containing feed content.

(2) Always checked robots.txt, and respected it.

(3) Looked for atom:summary elements, and when available, used then instead of atom:content. (This is a huge problem with RSS 2.0, and I would urge anyone with copyright concerns to switch their feed types ASAP.)

(4) Provided a consistent user-agent string with all requests, so the app could be easily blocked at the web server.

(5) Didn't run ads on any page containing feed data.

As far as I can tell, fav.or.it, doesn't do at least four of those five things to ensure that it is behaving responsibly. So I've got no problem with people complaining about them. But I *do* object to a lot of black-and-white thinking being injected into a debate that should have moved past such stuff a long time ago.

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

rogerben — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:49:45 -0000

On the web, things work both ways. If you don't want Google or the Internet Archive crawling and caching your site, you have to tell them. If you don't want someone using your syndication feed to republish your content, you need to tell them.

Constantly turning this into a "my rights vs. your rights" battle achieves nothing. If everyone involved will take a bare minimum of responsibility for their part in the online publication lifecycle, the issue goes away.

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

rogerben — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:09:55 -0000

Nick: Fixing this problem is very simple, using a method I've been advocating in the syndication community for years.

(1) Tell Duncan (and all other publishers) the user-agent string your service uses when fetching feeds.

(2) Check robots.txt before fetching each feed.

(3) If your user-agent is disallowed, either refuse to fetch the feed, or fetch it and truncate the content.

Many folks don't want anything to do with Creative Commons licenses, but pretty much anyone concerned about republication rights can upload a text file to their webroot.

Ideally, you and the folks behind other, similar services would all get together and agree to look for a "universal" user-agent in robots.txt... say, for example, "rssatomfetch". That would give site owners an easy, one-time mod to control how their posts are treated across all services. And it would bring an end to the endless "is this a splog or isn't it?" debates, since anyone ignoring robots.txt would be automatically considered a bad actor.

Re: Nikon Lens Pen

rogerben — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:16:01 -0000

I bought one last year, and love it. Especially handy if you're shooting on a beach or something, and need to be able to do a quick lens cleaning every hour or so.

Re: Comment fragmentation isn’t the blogger’s fault

rogerben — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 20:01:00 -0000

Honestly, I think Friendfeed is less a dilution of conversation than a reduction. By that I mean, FF boils away all of the one-line, superficial commentary that often clutters up a blog's comment section, leaving the stronger stuff.

Look at this entry's comments, for example. Multiple paragraphs everywhere, complete thoughts, coherent threading. While it's far from impossible to have a healthy discussion over yonder, FF's interface actively discourages substantive give-and-take. The cocktail party jabber goes there, the real communication stays here.

In the end, that's probably as it should be. There's a place in the world for just about everything.

Re: Funky Time cover (Scripting News)

rogerben — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:45:28 -0000

Dave: I don't know if you follow the NBA, so I thought I'd point out that Time is riffing on this year's batch of playoff ads:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k-pNx3hynY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAhhw9a0kzE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWXdTpAti7o

Re: Scoble and his Facebook data (Scripting News)

rogerben — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:00:10 -0000

Because Google silently accepts it from Facebook and lots of other services? It's kind of a lame answer, but probably close to the truth.

Here are the two questions I would ask both Plaxo and Facebook regarding their scraping activities:

(1) Does your robot respect robots.txt?

(2) If not, and you assert that robots.txt doesn't apply in this case, does your robot provide a clearly identifiable, consistent user-agent string with each request?

If the answer to (1) is "no", then that service is on shaky ground, IMO. If the answer to (2) is "no", then the service is acting in bad faith.